Eye-Openers: Tonga Room may be moved, Frances may move you

The Tonga Room may get a new owner and a new location, but that’s up to the City and could be determined in today’s meeting. Frances seduces John Mariani. Fagiani’s Bar has somehow spurred a whole political controversy up in downtown Napa. Jonathan Gold muses on “BajaMed Cuisine,” a new movement gaining steam in Baja California. All that and more, coming up.

From the local scene:

The Tonga Room‘s fate could be decided today at the Planning Commission meeting. One possible and titillating scenario has surfaced: the hotel has a letter of intent “with a local successful restaurateur who will buy the Tonga Room and move it to a new, as-yet-undetermined site.” More details may slip out in the meeting, but they could also wait until all the specifics are worked out. [San Francisco Chronicle]

John Mariani on Frances: “Frances epitomizes the emerging cooldown approach to feeding people. Not bloggers, not gourmands, not reviewers … And the fact that it’s such an amiable place — if you can get a reservation — makes the idea of a Sunday supper here all the more appealing.”[Esquire]

Meanwhile in Napa, the Fagiani’s Bar remodel has turned into a political melodrama: “What started as a simple issue — should the bar’s 1940s ceramic tile facade be retained as part of a building renovation? — has grown into charges of city council favoritism, planning commission obstructionism and political gamesmanship by candidate supporters.” [Napa Valley Register]

More on the Blue Bottle-Dolores Park situation. James Freeman says he thought “it would be a fun, delightful idea, but eventually it proved to be not so delightful.” [San Francisco Chronicle]

From the national scene:

Jonathan Gold reviews a guest chef stint in LA by Javier Plascencia, “the Tijuana chef at the forefront of what is sometimes called BajaMed Cuisine, a movement that marries the flavors and structures of the traditional Mexican kitchen with European technique, placing real Mexican cooking within the international culinary mainstream for perhaps the first time.” [LA Weekly]